Discussion Forums

First time...

So setiQuest caught my eye, and I thought I'd pitch in. After eagerly signing up and going through the the info on the site, I'm lost. What do I actually *do*? Is there a list of problems or a set of guidelines for new members?

Yes, our project is in a rather confusing state for newcomers at the moment. We are primarily looking for techies to help us build the infrastructure. If interested, let me know, and I'll try to elaborate.

If you are more interested in citizen science opportunities, it will be a little while before we have anything ready in this area.

Excellent. We don't have list of problems right now, so you'd have to dive in and find something you think would be useful. Feel free to ask in one of the existings threads in the forum.

Some general areas that would be useful to work in are:
- Visualizations
- Algorithms (either detectors or algorithms that reduce/compress data streams)
- Software (many poorly defined tasks to take on, I can elaborate)

- ATA-to-cloud conduit: we need a sensible way to stream to a large number of network hosts within the cloud: http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/ata-cloud-conduit
- Data archiver: we may want a program to archive subsets of the data stream from ATA (subject to discussions about how and what to archive)
- SonATA: jrseti had posted a to-do list, but for some reason it has been moved (you can poke him to get it back). But two of the tasks I remember related to:
-- Implementing status displays in Java (as opposed to the current text terminal format)
-- A better method for sending out status messages: http://setiquest.org/forum/topic/sonata-status-stream

Right now we collect radio wave in the .5GHz to 10 GHz range. At any time we decide which 4 "tunings" of 100 MHz each to use out of these - effectively leading us to discard 96% of the data.

In this 4%, we use digital signal processing to look for narrow strong signals. There may be other kinds of signals that we don't even look for. Is it possible to conceptualize other kinds of signals - e.g. weak broad signals, and develop algorithms to detect them?

Are there more efficient ways to do the digital signal processing that we are doing? That may result in us being able to use more than 4% for detection.

We have put out some documents on the wiki, and we expect to put out the entire software in a few weeks. You can already start understanding the algorithms we use - at a basic level. Come January, you will be able to get into as much depth as you would like, in the algorithms. At that point you can also suggest incremental or revolutionary changes.